Chekhov's Mistress
Cotter, Eshleman, Vallejo
John Cotter gives us some great context on Clayton Eshleman’s translations of César Vallejo’s poetry, about whom he says “is one of the earliest and most consistently underrepresented of what we today call the modernists (though Edmund Wilson famously, and with accuracy, called them late symbolists). Trilce was published in the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land, but it was published by an unknown writer in Peru and so wasn’t available in Europe or the U.S.”
He begins his piece in Open Letters with this apt description:
“Vallejo is a difficult poet to quote briefly because he writes with a kind of stutter: his thoughts are constantly breaking off, catching up with themselves late, contradicting. He demands the whole space of a poem to pull off his best effects. Those unable to read the second line of a poem without fully coming to terms with the first will have little truck with Vallejo. But this casual, idiosyncratic, endlessly creative course of expression is his innovation and his legacy.”
Recently a friend of mine brought his then girlfriend to visit here in Brooklyn. She’s Peruvian and this was her first week in the states. She didn’t speak much English, so I pulled out my Vallejo book to try to make a connection, pointing out “Agape,” which is one of my favorites. Naturally, she knew Vallejo and told me she particularly liked “Masa.” I thought she was talking about the stuff tortillas are made from. Needless, our cross-cultural exchange fizzled a bit, at least in that regard. Later that night, I picked up the book to look for this tortilla poem that my friend thought was so great and after a while I found “Masa” which is of couse “Mass” and of course means that I’m a dunce, particularly since that’s a forceful and altogether memorable poem that I couldn’t place as Masa when I should have.
Read Vallejo.
You can see my report (with video) from the Vallejo reading last April here and the Complete Review’s page and also in Open Letters a transcontemporation of Vallejo’s IX by Sampson Starkweather.
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: June 21, 2007
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
